Episode 7 (Vigilantes)

Night patrols have wrecked Koichi's college life; he sleeps through lectures and eats lunch while copying notes for an exam he is unprepared for. A confident classmate, Makoto Tsukauchi, sits down, borrows the Hero Sociology textbook their shared professor wrote, praises its content, and calls its prose a mess. Her advice, to copy notes from a club senior, falls apart when he admits he belongs to no club, which earns him a teasing loner label. She offers to take care of him, names his major and his campus nickname as the creeper haunting the eastern Naruhata ruins, and proposes a trade: schoolwork help for a guided tour of that neighborhood.

They go up to his penthouse the next day, where Pop☆Step is lounging. She dives behind her changing curtain, shoes and bag in hand, as Koichi asks Makoto to wait outside while he tidies. Scolding the absent idol for her mess, he also hides the All Might hoodie tied to his costume, then hurls her belongings, along with Knuckleduster's empty cans and takeout containers, behind the curtain, pelting her without knowing it.

Over coffee, Makoto sorts his courses into three buckets, exams only, assignments only, and attendance only, promising notes and past questions for the first two and warning him not to skip the third. Pop glares through the curtain throughout. They then review Chapter 3, on where vigilantism and the licensing system grind against each other. The book frames vigilantism as a transitional stage: ordinary people keep order during upheaval, and once things settle those groups are absorbed into official structures or wiped out. It began after Quirks appeared, with citizens using new abilities to hold things together, until regulation of habitual Quirk use produced the modern hero system.

Makoto says the reality is messier. In Rhode Island, where the first licensing statute passed, 189 vigilantes were active and exactly seven were approved as heroes; the rest became villains by law. Her reading is that the system existed to define villainy so it could be prosecuted, not to elevate heroes, and she notes the debates that persist today over self-determination and how arbitrary both labels can feel. She tags pages, tells him to repeat her explanation verbatim, then dangles a bonus question about what actually separated the two categories. Koichi guesses obedience to the law; she saves the real answer for her thesis and for after the tour. Her plan is fieldwork on the Naruhata Vigilantes, a rarity worth studying. Koichi, protecting three secret identities at once, says the trio are easy to find but warns her off the danger, and she cheerfully calls him her bodyguard, which leaves him red.

After she leaves, Pop bursts out to mock his grin and later brands Makoto a shameless floozy for barging into other people's homes, the irony lost on her. At home, Makoto needles her older brother Naomasa for details on Quirk crimes and for hero interviews, and he refuses both, telling her not to chase villains for quotes. She argues that hero and villain conduct overlaps so much the line between them stops meaning anything; he counters that villains slide from believing they have crossed nothing to trampling the line outright.

Days later, Koichi drills a new Ultimate Move with Knuckleduster, High-Speed Double Sweep, blending low sweeps with the precision of Slide and Glide for control and escape options. The old man approves, Pop calls it cowardly, and hearing about Makoto, Knuckleduster warns that one slip brings police and villains down on them. He floats silencing her by force; Koichi refuses to let it come to that, and is told to keep work and personal life apart.

At the station Koichi is dazzled by her outfit while Pop stalks them in costume, dismissing the woman as average. Makoto maps the sighting hotspots and starts street interviews to gauge public opinion, testing her theory that popularity drove the split, since Quirks vary too wildly for uniform law and the Hero Billboard Chart is essentially a popularity contest. Ichimoku and Jube adore Pop☆Step, recoil from the violent grandpa, and needle Koichi about the Cruller to his face. The tally is brutal: Pop is known for her looks, Knuckleduster is obscure and frightening, and the Crawler is helpful and creepy in several flavors.

A penguin-faced thief, Emperor Yotsuura, snatches the laptop mid-jog. Koichi hands over her camcorder and gives chase, suits up in an alley, and brushes off Pop's argument that losing the laptop would end the investigation. Out in the open the Crawler catches up, tries his new sweep, and eats an Emperor Shot to the face. Ichimoku's eye beams drop the thief, Koichi secures the laptop, and the two middle schoolers stomp the man into the pavement while Jube ties him up.

Out of costume, Koichi returns the device and blames a fall for his scratches, crediting the Crawler for the save while Ichimoku points out the Cruller did nothing this time. As they part, Makoto takes his hand and uses Polygraph, which reads the truth of anyone she touches, and asks whether he is secretly the Cruller. He denies it, honestly, since that is not his name, and she apologises, losing her answer to her own misheard nickname. That night she tells her brother she may have lost her touch, while at the penthouse Koichi and Pop bicker over their terrible public image, his chief complaint being that nobody calls him the Crawler.

Makoto Tsukauchi befriends Koichi and recruits him as a guide for thesis research on the Naruhata Vigilantes, without knowing he is one of them.

A history lesson traces the hero system to the Rhode Island statute, where only seven of 189 vigilantes were licensed and the rest were classified as villains.

Koichi debuts High-Speed Double Sweep, loses to Emperor Yotsuura, and escapes exposure when Polygraph confirms he is not the Cruller.

The seventh episode of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, part of the Senpai arc, adapting Chapter 12 and Chapter 13.

The anime expands the vigilante history lesson with new imagery of early American heroes, villains, and vigilantes, adds Pop's growing irritation and jealousy, and slips in a brief moment of Makoto taking out her contacts, a nod to the Chapter 13 cover.

Brazilian illustrator R.B. Silva drew a number of the images that appear in that history segment.